Cockeyed Optimist

Amy Poehler gets her own sitcom.

In NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” Poehler plays a perky, can-do gal, proud to be a government worker.Credit ROBERT RISKO

Is there a more appealing performer on television than Amy Poehler? Yes, “appealing” sounds bland and unappreciative, and it’s unspecific, but the radiance and the warmth that come from Poehler are general and broad in the best way, and they offer a universal welcome. There’s no entrance fee of coolness or hipness for enjoying her humor, and you don’t hate yourself afterward. In turn, her audience wishes her well; of all the cast members on “Saturday Night Live” in the past ten years or so (Poehler was on the show from 2001 to 2008), she’s probably the one whom people most love to love. Every comedian is saying, “Hey, look at me!” Poehler’s characters, in addition to that, seem to be saying, “Hey, let’s go hang out at my house after school and have some snacks! Yay!” Her performer’s demand for attention and need for control get acted out in characters who display relentless and mostly cockeyed enthusiasm—they’re people who are desperate to bubble over. That’s where Poehler’s edge is—the place where her inclusiveness meets the “me me me” of the comedian’s ego. She wants you to come and play, but she’ll be the one who decides what snacks you’re going to eat, what games you’re going to play, and what time you have to go home. That’s how she could be just right when she played Dakota Fanning as a talk-show host on “S.N.L.,” breaking down the child star’s unsettling self-presentation into its components of innocent bubbliness and burning ambition.

But, while Poehler’s impressions on “S.N.L.” were wicked, they weren’t usually cruel (unless it can be considered cruel to call attention to a politician’s phoniness or a celebrity’s self-absorption). They weren’t necessarily all terrific, either, or dead on. Her seeming good nature may have prevented her from truly nailing Hillary Clinton during the campaign last year; the words were right, the attitude was right, but something was missing—and perhaps it’s difficult to know how far to go in skewering someone when you know that your boss is going to invite that person to come on the show. (Tina Fey’s killer takedown of Sarah Palin was ever so slightly less sensational the night that Palin appeared on the show.) In any case, Poehler’s performances had a spirit that didn’t depend on pinpoint accuracy; her forte is showing the chaos that is about to, and sometimes does, break through even the most apparently composed characters. The best part of her take on Clinton had to do with expressing the way Clinton’s not quite getting what she wanted made her, underneath it all, crazed.

To old-time watchers of “S.N.L.,” Poehler was Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin rolled into one. And you always felt in good hands during a Poehler skit; unlike some of the other performers—the men of recent years come to mind—she never seemed sloppy or on the verge of being downright awful. As was also true when watching Phil Hartman, another reliable, all-around player, you never thought, Man, how did she ever get on this show? She also rocked, doing an awesome rap number during the “Weekend Update” segment when Palin was on—a loudly percussive litany of ridicule, ending with Poehler standing behind a seated Palin and stabbing the air with her index finger to the sound of gunshots, throwing all her weight into it, in homage to Palin’s hunting habit. The Governor may have felt as if she’d been poked in the eye with a sharp stick; to a viewer it didn’t seem cruel, just brave. (It was impressive in another way as well: Poehler, limber and always on the beat during the number, was pregnant to the max, and gave birth just a week later.)

Poehler has been doing improvisational comedy for about half her life (she’s thirty-seven), and you sense that what drives her isn’t quite the need to entertain but, rather, a desire to perform, to keep getting better at her craft. She still does improv in a New York theatre with the Upright Citizens Brigade, and she has branched out to other areas, voicing the manic main character, Bessie Higgenbottom, an energetic steamroller of a little girl, in a Nickelodeon cartoon called “The Mighty B!” and hosting a Web series for pre-teen girls called “Smart Girls at the Party,” in which she interviews kids who do interesting but not intimidatingly spectacular things. They’re regular kids—one loves to garden, one dances, one does yoga—and Poehler talks to them in a low-key, engaging tone of voice. She introduces each guest in a funny and sweetly hyperbolic way—she described the third grader who did yoga as a “yogini, inventor, philosopher, humanitarian, gravity-defyer, and chocolate lover,” making the girl smile. The project is far from being an ego trip; Poehler says at the beginning of each six-minute episode that the aim is to “celebrate extraordinary individuals who are changing the world by being themselves,” and the modest show does just that.

So this brings me, a little uncomfortably, to the show that Poehler is now starring in, “Parks and Recreation,” which began a couple of weeks ago and runs in NBC’s Thursday-night comedy block. It was inevitable and fitting that Poehler would get her own show—fitting, but maybe not the best fit. The series, which was created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, comedy-writing veterans whose credits include “The Office” and “Saturday Night Live,” is done in the now possibly overworked style known as mockumentary, and Poehler plays Leslie Knope, the deputy director of the Parks and Recreation Department in Pawnee, Indiana. She’s a clipboard-toting, can-do gal, proud to be a government worker. In a playground, after trying without response to quiz a little girl playing in the sand about her enjoyment of the park and to get a drunk off a slide with a broom, she smiles and says, “You know, government isn’t just a boy’s club anymore. . . . It’s a great time to be a woman in politics—Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, me, Nancy Pelosi.” Leslie says this line the way she says everything else, with a smile on her face that is not properly tuned to the occasion, eyes a little too wide with optimism and ambition, and all irony or self-awareness barred at the door. Setting up a visit to her mother (Pamela Reed), a “mucky-muck in the county school system,” she looks into the camera and attests that her mother is “as respected as Mother Teresa, she’s as powerful as Stalin, and she’s as beautiful as Margaret Thatcher.” Of course, her mother is awful to her, and we see Leslie scrambling to keep her pride in the presence of this spirit-crusher. That’s a good moment. And there are many of them in “Parks and Recreation,” in fact; virtually every scene in the first two episodes contains good bits, with quotable quotes, twists of language that viewers feel smart for getting, and visual gags. But the minutes don’t flow; they merely accrete, one bit on top of another. The show has a lot—too much—in common with “The Office”; almost every character in that show has a counterpart in the office of “Parks.” And I’m not sure I want to see the Leslie Knope character get more rounded out, as Steve Carell’s paper-salesman Michael Scott has done over the seasons. It’s not that Poehler isn’t capable of playing a full character—she’s a comic actress, not simply a comedian—but, given what the story is so far, the road to self-discovery appears to be mined with humiliation and disappointment. And yet if Leslie doesn’t get a clue, every episode is doomed to be more or less the same. Leslie’s big issue, her baby, is an abandoned construction pit that she wants to fill in and turn into a park—“This could be my Hoover Dam”—but it may be that for “Parks and Recreation” the pit is only going to get deeper. ♦